The present invention relates to the field of disk drives in data storage products, and more particularly to a system and method for optimal vibration dampening in data storage products.
Currently, several data storage products are available which utilize multiple hard disk drives to attain high storage capacities. Packing a large number of disk drives together makes them susceptible to vibrations during shipping, installation, use and operation. Vibrations can be internal or external. Internal vibrations refer to those frequencies that arise from the rotation of disk drives in a data storage device. External vibrations include shock and vibrations due to any other mechanical or electrical instruments such as computers and fans in the vicinity of the data storage device. Shock energy can occur during installation, accidental bumping or pounding of the data storage device. The frequencies of vibrations can range from 5 Hz to 300 Hz.
Packing multiple disk drives into data storage products requires the balancing of several engineering and cost factors, to provide an optimal solution for limiting vibrations in disk drives. Disk drive mounting schemes play an important role in controlling vibration and shock. Such schemes have either rigidly mounted individual drives or isolated individual drives. A rigidly mounted disk drive does not have any dampening material between the individual disk drive and the disk drive enclosure. Therefore, the drive and the drive enclosure act together as a unitary mass, raising the effective inertia of the entire disk drive and reducing the sources of vibration. On the other hand, isolated individual drives provide isolation by incorporating an isolation material between the individual disk drive and the disk drive enclosure. However, neither approach effectively addresses the co-location of hundreds of disk drives. Both approaches are not cost-effective in the case of high-density product implementations. Further, the rigid mounting and individual isolation of each disk drive limits the overall density of a system due to space and thermal constraints.
The ability of high-density data storage products to withstand high shock and vibration levels is becoming increasingly important as the use of redundant array of independent disks (RAID) based, rack-mount systems grow. RAID is a system of disk drives that employs multiple disk drives, in combination, for data storage. A large number of disk drives that spin up and down at different intervals can be co-located in the same rack. This introduces the disk drives in the system or surrounding systems to multiple sources of vibration and operational shock. Vibrations result in the abrasion of mechanical components of disk drives. These components include the heads for reading data and platters. Vibrations also interfere with the operation of disk drives. They can damage a disk drive internally, without showing any external evidence of damage. All such vibrations have to be dampened, to prevent wear and tear of disk drives, premature drive failure, retention of data in disk drives and undue increase in access times.
Prior art systems may take up precious space that could have been utilized for additional disk drives to store more data. There are a few system configurations in which there is an overuse of dampening materials. This blocks the airflow and thus results in heating the system.